Prosecutor Overseeing Turkish Graft Inquiry Is Removed From Case

A departing Turkish minister, Erdogan Bayraktar, waved Thursday as he left his post. He has called on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to resign.Credit
Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency, via European Pressphoto Agency

ISTANBUL — An Istanbul prosecutor who had been overseeing a sprawling corruption investigation of the prime minister’s inner circle was removed from the case on Thursday, in a new sign of a profound power struggle over Turkey’s judiciary and police forces.

The prosecutor, Muammer Akkas, issued a condemnation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, accusing it of interfering with the judiciary and preventing him from carrying out his work.

Mr. Akkas said that the government had prevented the police forces from pursuing a new round of suspects in the widening inquiry. Among those suspects, according to several Turkish news media reports, is Mr. Erdogan’s son, whose name was on a summons that was leaked to the press on Thursday evening.

“The judiciary has clearly been pressured,” Mr. Akkas said in a written statement, charging his superiors with “committing a crime” for not carrying out arrest warrants, and saying that suspects had been allowed to “take precautions, flee and tamper with evidence.”

On Friday, a top Turkish court suspended an attempt by the government to funnel all corruption investigations through top police and judicial officials, The Associated Press reported. The High Administrative Court said it would suspend the rule while allowing more deliberations on the issue, a week after Turkey’s bar association petitioned the court for its cancellation, according to The A.P.

Separately, three members of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials A.K.P., resigned from the party, bring the total to six in the past week and indicating more dissension in its ranks.

The military said in a statement on its website that it would not get involved in a political dispute, a declaration that seemed to be an affirmation of Mr. Erdogan’s success over the years in banishing the military from politics. This is just the sort of crisis that would likely have already triggered the intervention of the military in the past, experts said. In a sense, the conflict amounts to a test of Turkey’s ability to move through a massive political crisis without the military standing by as a guarantor of stability.

The prosecutor’s removal from the case came a day after the resignations of three ministers whose sons had been implicated. One of them, the environment and urban planning minister, Erdogan Bayraktar, broke precedent by calling for the prime minister to resign, too.

Soon afterward, Mr. Erdogan announced a broader overhaul of his cabinet. Though some of the moves had already been planned, so that certain ministers could run in mayoral elections in March, the shake-up was widely seen as an effort to install loyalists around him.

The unfolding scandal has already done significant political damage to Mr. Erdogan, who has been in power for more than a decade and was widely considered a likely candidate in next summer’s presidential election, which for the first time will be determined by a national vote.

Photo

Muammer AkkasCredit
Osman Arslan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The corruption allegations are centered on claims of bribery involving vast real estate projects, many of them in Istanbul, that have become a hallmark of Mr. Erdogan’s time in power. No one has been convicted, but several people, including two sons of government ministers, have been arrested, and one of the departing ministers on Wednesday said that the prime minister himself had been involved in the real estate deals facing scrutiny.

As the crisis has deepened, Mr. Erdogan has taken to suggesting that the inquiry is a foreign plot, and in remarks published on Thursday he said that he believed that he was the ultimate target of the investigation.

Mr. Erdogan told the daily newspaper Hurriyet that those who tried to embroil him in the investigation would be “left empty-handed.” He made the comments to reporters on a plane as he returned from a visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.

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After the prosecutor, Mr. Akkas, went public with his allegations of judicial interference, Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, Turhan Colakkadi, made his own remarks, saying that Mr. Akkas had been removed because he had been leaking information to the news media.

A higher judicial authority, the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which appoints judges and prosecutors and also oversees disciplinary actions against them, supported Mr. Akkas. The council also condemned a recent government decree that requires prosecutors to receive permission for investigations from ministers, calling it a blatant attempt to rein in the inquiry. The organization said that the new decree “violates the Constitution, and those who govern the country are subject to the supervision of the judiciary.”

The prosecutor’s removal on Thursday was the newest and most direct step yet in a government purge of police and judicial officials responsible for the inquiry.

Many officials within Turkey’s police and judiciary are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic spiritual leader who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Mr. Gulen and Mr. Erdogan represent competing Islamist traditions and once were partners in dismantling much of the structure of Turkey’s secular state, which ruled for decades with the military as the ultimate power.

Now, the same police and judiciary that pursued the generals — and won, through a series of court cases that put many officers in prison — appear to be pursuing Mr. Erdogan’s government.

The investigation became public last week with a series of raids, and subsequent leaks to the news media, and the government has already dismissed dozens of police chiefs and many other lower-level officers.

Turkey’s opposition on Thursday accused Mr. Erdogan of trying to rule via a secretive “deep state,” following the cabinet reshuffle in which he moved to cement his control over the police by installing a key ally at the powerful Interior Ministry.

Mr. Erdogan “is trying to put together a cabinet that will not show any opposition to him,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, said in remarks reported by the Turkish news media. “Erdogan has a deep state.”

The term “deep state” has a sinister connotation in Turkey. It alludes to a murky group of operatives once thought to be linked to the military that many Turks believe carried out operations outside democratic structures.

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2013, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Prosecutor Overseeing Turkish Graft Inquiry Is Removed From Case. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe